What will 2025 bring our way? A question such as this is a puzzle. If our answers are to make sense or show reason, we should look first at the big picture as if the pieces are fitted together. Then, we should deconstruct the picture and analyze how we match pieces and fill in gaps. The question is not unanswerable; the question requires some thought.
The Big Picture: Peace
Whether my own year 2025 lasts seven days only (I'm writing this on January 7) or I see it through to December 31 is unanswerable. I am not a seer, much less a goddess. However, I know what I want to see. And based on 71 previous years of experience, I have a fair grasp of reality. I want to see peace in Europe, the Middle East, the African continent, in our nation's cities. Peace is attainable. Only those who hold onto grudges and biases against other human beings and the tribes we form willingly exclaim -- with arrogance as if holding onto hope is inhuman or unintelligent -- that peace is impossible. Peace is attainable. Peace is an era during which all sects, factions, nations, and tribes agree to coexist. They agree to disagree about beliefs that harm no one, agree to bury beliefs that do harm others. Like the belief that white Christian men are superior to all other humans and their associations.
This belief having no basis in scientific fact must be buried so deep in the earth's crust that it is melted in the heat of the earth's core. This belief is at the root of most conflicts, most community and international problems, from famine to housing and water crises to wars between nations. Peace is attainable; one way to usher in a peaceful era is to bury any belief, no matter how precious it is in a religion's tenets or to a region's institutions, where the next generation cannot learn of it experientially, cannot imagine their world with it, does not want to revive it.
To coexist in a peaceful era, we must also share our best with each other. Governments and religions are on the surface good about sharing their leftovers. The we will take care of ourselves first then see to others after we've been sated is the creed of all governments and organized religions. And sometimes that policy seems to work. But reality is different from anecdote. Reality is where every human lives inside the policy. For example, the trickle-down theory is driven by anecdote, not by analyses of how all people below the top crust thrive or struggle or die under the policy. All People: men other than wealthy white Christian men, women, children, seniors and retirees, those with homes and those without, LGBTQ, workers and business owners, slaves, military, artists, professionals, food growers, religious and non-religious. Government policies and religious policies must be reevaluated on a continuum. We live in a remarkable technological time. Data -- when it is ethically and scientifically collected, shared and updated -- can quickly show how a policy affects any one person or group. Evaluations and changes no matter how miniscule can systematically be applied to improve the policy. For example, if a church has traditionally vetted and protected its top fliers -- the ministers and biggest donors --by denying transparency or covering scandals, the entire church is contaminated. Corruption thrives where the powerful live under different rules and are entitled to privileges that all others must accept as normal. Peace cannot exist where corruption protects the powerful.
I desire peace in 2025. I need inner peace. My mind and energy are sapped by a daily battle with depression. I find peace in the hours where depression is overcome by good conversation, a good book, music, furry friends, outdoor walks. But more important, because I think about the world in which my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live, I desire peace everywhere else.